CHAPTER 12 PERSONALITY THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSONALITY personality

CHAPTER 12 -PERSONALITY

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSONALITY personality is a person’s long term pattern of thinking, emotions, and behavior blend of talents, values, hopes, loves, hates, and habits that makes each of us as a unique person Personality is also distinct from temperament sensitivity, irritability, distractibility, typical mood

TRAITS Personality traits– stable qualities that a person shows in most situations; inferred from behavior once identified, they can be used to predict future behavior

TYPES personality type refers to people who have several traits in common: Carl Jung categorized personalities into two types 1. Introverts – shy, egocentric person whose attention is focused inward 2. Extroverts – bold, outgoing person whose attention is focused outward way of labeling people who have several key traits in common.

SELF-CONCEPT provide another way of understanding personality consists of all your ideas, perceptions, and feeling about who you are; the mental picture you have of your own personality created from daily experiences; slowly revised as we have new experiences; tends to guide what we pay attention to, remember, and think about. Self-Esteem High Low

Personality Theories-a system of concepts, assumptions, ideas, and principles proposed to explain personality Trait theories attempt to learn what traits make up personality and how they relate to actual behavior Psychodynamic theories focus on the inner workings of personality, especially internal conflicts and struggles Humanistic theories stress private, subjective experience and personal growth. Behaviorist and social learning theories place importance on the external environment and on the effects of conditioning and learning. Social learning theories attribute differences in personality to socialization, expectations and mental processes

The Trait Approach-currently the dominant method for studying personality theorists try to describe personality with a number of key traits try to analyze, classify, and interrelate traits; think of them as biological predispositions Predicting Behavior knowing how you rate on this single dimension allows us to predict how you will behave in a variety of settings

CLASSIFYING TRAITS Common Traits – tell us how people from a particular nation or culture are similar, or which traits a culture emphasizes Individual Traits define a person’s unique personal qualities Cardinal Traits – so basic that all of a person’s activities can be traced to the trait.

Central Traits – basic building blocks of personality just six traits would provide a good description of personality: dominant, sociable, honest, cheerful, intelligent, optimistic Secondary Traits – less consistent, relatively superficial aspects of a person Source Traits surface traits-these often appeared together in groups; these were so closely related they seemed to represent a single trait source traits; they are the core of each individual’s personality

Cattell identified 16 source traits; all 16 are needed to fully describe a personality trait profile -draws a picture/graph of individual personalities to compare them The Big Five the five-factor model is a system that identifies the five most basic dimensions of personality Extroversion Agreeableness Conscientiousness Neuroticism Openness to experience

PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY believe that many of our actions are based on hidden, or unconscious, needs, thoughts or emotions. The Structure of Personality Id is made up of innate biological instincts and urges. -operates on the pleasure principle -acts as a well of energy for the entire psyche -this energy is called libido and flows from life instincts. -thanatos - death instinct- produces aggressive and destructive urges

ego –the executive -directs energies supplied by the id. -guided by the reality principle – It is a system of thinking, planning, problem solving, and deciding. It is in conscious control of the personality. superego acts as a judge or censor for the thoughts and actions of the ego. -conscience. the ego ideal reflects all behavior one’s parents approved of or rewarded. -acts as an internalized parent to bring behavior under control.

all of these are conflicting mental processes – internal struggles -you feel anxiety when your ego is threatened or overwhelmed. impulses from the id cause neurotic anxiety when the ego can barely keep them under control. threats of punishment from the superego cause moral anxiety many resort to ego-defense mechanisms to lessen internal conflicts – these deny distort or block our sources of threat and anxiety.

Freud believed that our behavior often expresses unconscious (hidden) forces -the unconscious holds repressed memories and emotions, plus the instinctual drives of the id -the conscious level includes everything you are aware of at a given moment -the preconscious contains material that can be easily brought to awareness

Personality Development Freud theorized that the core of personality is formed before the age 6 in a series of psychosexual stages. -at each stage, a different part of the body becomes an erogenous zone a fixation is an unresolved conflict or emotional hang-up caused by overindulgence or by frustration.

Oral Stage – during the first year of life, most of an infant’s pleasure comes from stimulation of the mouth -a fixation in this stage produces an oral dependant personality - are gullible, passive and need lots of attention Anal Stage – Between the ages of 1 -3, the child’s attention shifts to the process of elimination. -an anal retentive (holding in) personality is obstinate, stingy, orderly, and compulsively clean. -anal expulsive (letting go) personalities are disorderly, destructive, cruel, or messy

Phallic Stage – these fixations develop between ages 3 -6; increased sexual interest causes the child to be physically attracted to the parent of the opposite sex. -Oedipus conflict (males) – the boy feels a rivalry with his father for the affection of his mother -girls experience the Electra conflict – the girl loves her father and competes with her mother

Latency – from age 6 to puberty – a period of quiet time during which psychosexual development is dormant. Genital Stage – at puberty an upswing in sexual energies activates all the unresolved conflicts of earlier years.

Neo-freudians- those who stayed close to the core of Freud’s thinking; accepted the broad features but revised parts of it Alfred Adler – we are social creatures governed by social urges, not biological instincts. -the main driving force in personality is a striving for superiority – a struggle to overcome imperfections, an upward drive for competence, completion, and mastery of shortcomings -this creates a person’s style of life; is formed by age 5 and is revealed by the earliest memory that can be recalled

Karen Horney -a core of basic anxiety occurs when people feel isolated and helpless in a hostile world; rooted in childhood. -emotional health reflects a balance in moving toward, away from, and against others. Carl Jung -a persona (mask) exists between the ego and the outside world. -the persona is the public self presented to others; we adopt particular roles or hide our deeper feelings.

Humanistic Theory focuses on human experience, problems, potentials, and ideals. the core of humanism is a positive image of humans as creative beings capable of free will emphasize the immediate subjective experienceprivate perceptions of reality -there as many real worlds as there are people

Maslow and Self-Actualization -referred to the process of fully developing personal potentials as self-actualization -a continuous search for personal fulfillment Efficient perceptions of reality Comfortable acceptance of self, others, nature Spontaneity Task centering Autonomy Continued freshness of appreciation Fellowship with humanity Profound interpersonal relationships Comfort with solitude Nonhostile sense of humor Peak experiences

Carl Rogers’ Self Theory the fully functioning person lives in harmony with his or her deepest feelings and impulses; open to experience and trust their inner urges and intuitions -Rogers emphasizes -self – a flexible and changing perception of personal identity -Information or feelings inconsistent with the self-image as said to be incongruent –incongruence -being authentic is vital for healthy functioning; we need to feel that our behavior accurately expresses who we are -it is essential to have congruence between the self-image and the -ideal self-the person you would most like to be -our ideal self is only one of a number of -possible selvespersons we could become or are afraid of becoming

Humanistic View of Development the development of a self-image depends greatly on information from the environment positive and negative evaluations by others cause children to develop internal standards of evaluations called conditions of worth learning to evaluate some experience or feelings as “good” and others as “bad” is directly related to a later capacity for self-esteem, positive selfevaluation or -positive self-regard

Learning Theories Behavioral personality theories emphasize that personality is no more or less than a collection of learned behavior patterns. -personality is acquired through classical and operant conditioning, observational learning, reinforcement, extinction, generalization, and discrimination

How Situations Affect Behavior what is predictable about personality is that we respond in consistent ways to certain types of situations -Personality = Behavior -habits make up the structure of personality. They are governed by four elements of learning: -drive – any stimulus strong enough to goad a person into action -cues-signals from the environment that guide responses -responses-actions-so that they are most likely to bring about reward

Social Learning Theory affected by situation, expectancy, and reinforcement value -situation – how a person interprets or defines the situation -expectancy – anticipation that a response will lead to a reinforcement -expected reinforcement may be more important than actual past reinforcement -reinforcement value – we attach different values to various activities or rewards

Self-Efficacy – the capacity for producing a desired result- one of the most important expectancies we develop Self-Reinforcement- refers to praising or rewarding yourself for having made a particular response (completing an assignment) -self praise and self-blame become an important part of personality – closely related to self-esteem

Behaviorist View -childhood is a time of urgent drives, powerful rewards and punishments, frustration and social reinforcement -During childhood there are 4 Critical Situations that are capable of leaving a lasting imprint on personality: Feeding toilet training sex training learning to express anger or aggression

-when parents accept their children and give them affection, the children become sociable, positive, and emotionally stable…high esteem Personality and Gender identification and imitation contribute greatly to personality development and to sex training -Identification leads to imitation, a desire to act like the admired person

Nature and Nurture temperament – the raw material from which our personalities are formed – the biological predispositions to be sensitive, irritable, distractible. -starts to stabilize around age 3 continues to harden through age 50 -behavioral genetics-the study of inherited behavioral traits -intelligence, some mental disorders, temperament, and other complex qualities are influenced by heredity

Studying Twins medical and psychological tests reveal that reunited twins are very much alike, even when they are reared apart; despite the wide difference in childhood environment studies of twins make it clear that heredity has a sizable effect on each of us; reasonable to conclude that heredity is responsible for 25 to 50 percent of the variation in many personality traits